Cascadia Advocate

Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Imagine that--no reason to attack Iraq

Well, it's not actually news anymore, but surprise: There were no WMDs to be found in Iraq, and Saddam had in fact, disarmed after the 1991 fiasco that left his military next to useless.

Of course, this line of thinking was met with ridicule and scorn from neocons from 2003 to 2006, long after anybody with a brain had concluded the obvious anyway.

So why bother to hide another leftwing nutjob report that says there was utterly no military reason to bomb the bejeezus out of Iraq? Oh. The report was from the Pentagon? Well, that changes things a bit.

Once again, the Decider administration has opted out of public scrutiny by simply not publishing matters of public record. If you want it, you need to request it on CD or DVD. It's bad enough that they scrub the Decider's press conference transcripts so he actually sounds literate, but the continual hiding of information that might be “politically sensitive” (as the Pentagon official said) is one of the reasons we have to make sure this administration does not continue. As in: Do not allow John McCain to win in November.

Once again, if Iraq posed no military threat to us, why did we attack? After realizing there was nothing to fear, why did we stay? After seeing what our continuing presence was doing there, why didn't we at least repair some of the damage and get the hell out?

Next week we'll reach a somber anniversary in this occupation: Five years. As a nation we have squandered the goodwill of other nations, ruined our reputation as a model democracy, and have generally behaved as a bully as we have enriched the defense industry, lobbyists, and oil barons.

So it's no surprise, I suppose, that the Decider wants to hide more bad news about what will be his legacy: Failure on a catastrophically large scale, generations of people in the Middle East who will forever hate America, and an economy in recession. The military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about 50 years ago has bitten us on the hind end.

We can correct this, or at least begin the process, in November. Let's keep all of this primary stuff in perspective. Let's disagree, let's debate, and then let's come together and give the White House back to Americans again. It's been far too long.